For a reminder of the situation, see also:

• Playing evil with VMWare ESX Server, and
• Playing evil with VMWare ESX Server, part 2

I finally had time at work to implement a solution for the problem. The result is a bit less than 400 lines of code, which I hope to be able to make free-as-speech. I’ll probably have tons of paperwork to do with my employer before that can happen… The program implements a fuse filesystem that you feed with a raw device image file (but I’m willing to implement more image file formats), and that shows the individual partitions as separate files, named “partn.fstype“. These files can then be mounted via loopback devices the standard way (which was not possible on vmfs for the reason you can find in my first post on the subject), with the benefit of not requiring offset adjustments (as when you want to mount partitions from a disk image), or some loopback device hack. Additionally, it has an internal Copy-On-Write mechanism so that it is possible to mount “dirty” ext3 filesystems (e.g. a snapshot of a mounted filesystem) without modifying the original disk image. Note that there is no way, yet, to keep these writes after unmounting the fuse filesystem. It uses libparted to handle the partition table reading, which means it will read any disk label types parted supports, such as BSD labels, sun partition tables, and so on. It doesn’t support LVM, though. Unfortunately, VMWare ESX server 3.0 being based on RedHat Enterprise Linux 3, only an ancient version of libparted is available. By the way, this version (1.6.3) had a pretty bad bug that made it impossible to use it for regular files instead of devices: it was trying to do a BLKGETSIZE (or was it HDIO_GETGEO ?) ioctl on it. To workaround this, I implemented my own PedArchitecture. It was somehow a revelation, because with similar mechanism, I can implement support for different disk image types :). Anyways, there have been quite some API changes in-between, so some updates will have to be done to the code… In other news, I started working on ext3rminator again. There may be a new release in a few weeks. Update: Thinking again about the ioctl issue, I’m wondering if vmfs couldn’t be responsible (again) for the failure, actually… I’ll check that on monday.

So one of the darling drugs for bipolar disorder (and I believe schizophrenia) has been Zyprexa.. Marked by the pharmaceutical company as a wonder drug, for being safe and effective, it has just come out that Eli Lilly, maker of the drug, hid and downlplayed the severity of side-effects. This is big because critics from survivors to academics and journalists and have been attacking pharmaceutical science for this very reason… This explicit revelation is thus pretty gynormous. I am frantically getting ready to go to PR, so that is I can say but more later…

Several years ago, Pinochet was prosecuted by the Spanish judge Baltasar Garz n:


On October 17, 1998, while traveling to the United Kingdom for medical treatment, Pinochet was arrested on a Spanish provisional warrant for the murder in Chile of Spanish citizens while he was president. Five days later, Pinochet was served with a second provisional arrest warrant from judge Baltasar Garz n of Spain charging him with systematic torture, murder, illegal detention, and disappearances. Pinochet was placed under house arrest in Britain while appealing the legal authority of the Spanish and British courts to try him, but eventually released on medical grounds by the then Home Secretary Jack Straw without facing trial. .

Garz n became my hero since that very moment.

Since then I have been repeating like crazy: Pinochet, al talego , which barely means Get Pinochet behind bars . Now I am smiling as I think Pinochet, al hoyo , which I will not even try to translate. I pity the worms his unpunished criminal corpse will breed.

Go take a look at the Valech Report.

Cheers!

Swing dancing (i.e. Lindy Hop, Balboa, Boogie Woogie) is my big hobby these days. It started with Rock'n'Roll dancing some years ago, and when I was in Berkeley I picked up some Lindy. Since February I've been going to social lindy dancing every couple of weeks. This month I've become a member of Boogie Bären (yes, that is "boogie bears"), a Munich dance club, and started taking classes in Lindy Hop, Boogie and Balboa every week, in addition to my usual lindy social dancing on sunday. Right now I'm right in an "extreme dancing" phase. It started tuesday with the Lindy classes (yes, both of them, over 3 hours), followed by the boogie beginners class on wednesday and the balboa beginners class on thursday. Friday there was a great balboa and swing party in a bar, with top attendees: the teachers of the workshops on saturday and sunday (which I have attended and will continue to attend tomorrow), Andy & Christelle from Lyon and Marty & Valerie from Cleveland. They've been great teachers so far, and their skills are very impressive. And they showed us some really cute moves. After the second half of the workshop on sunday, there will be social lindy dancing in the evening again, monday evening there is swing dancing in another bar in Munich [Update: with live music, Route 66, in addition to the usual singing DJ], tuesday will likely feature a liveband and boogie dancing (it's a holiday, so no regular lindy classes that day), followed again by boogie beginners course on wednesday, balboa class on thursday, maybe balboa and swing dancing in a bar on friday. Maybe I'll then watch the German championships in Boogie Woogie and Rock'n'Roll on saturday, social dancing on sunday and monday again, and so on. It's getting somewhat out of hand, as you can see. I should focus more on my diploma thesis instead... so I'll skip saturday. ;-) [Update: did I mention that Munich has a fantastic Lindy/Balboa scene? Upcoming events include a big balboa weekend 11./12. november, the new years swing ball and the Rock that swing festival in February.]

Debian development expected to halt! In a shocking revelation our reporter exposes a conspiracy to cover up the biggest risk to Debian development, ever! #debian-devel, the secret hangout of Debian movers and shakers, today casually discussed the possibility of the Debian bug tracking system running out of new bug numbers. This was the first hint of the impeding doom. When word leaked to our investigative reporter, he quickly dug into the case. Despite public protestations and secret threats, the truth was soon outed! Debian users will soon be unable to report new bugs. The bug tracking system uses a limited, fixed size integer for doing calculations on bug numbers, and the project is soon reaching its limits. With no new bugs to fix, Debian development can't continue. "We're already at six digits, there's only three more to go", says Lars Wirzenius, the Inquirer's resident technological expert. One wonders where the official annoucement is. Once again the Debian Inquirer delivers the scoop!

Yesterday I posted about my first steps with cfengine. By the end of the day today, I had things far along that I can:

• cdebootstrap a directory
• Run a special cfengine script to get the base files like /etc/fstab and /etc/hosts set up
• Bring it up in Xen, apt-get install cfengine2, and use cfagent to bring up the rest of the system and install the necessary base packages (like xfsprogs)

Very nice.

I've had a few annoyances with the cfengine packages support, which doesn't quite seem to work as documented al the time.

I also took a look at bcfg2 thanks to a comment yesterday. It looks very interesting, but I have a few gripes about it. I find cfengine files easier to read. I can look at a file, having never used cfengine before, and have a reasonable idea of what is trying to be done and how it will be accomplished. I can't say the same for bcfg2, plus bcfg2 uses XML config files (ick) and a bunch of small otherfiles. While the architecture as the authors have described it certainly sounds appealing, I'm not sure that bcfg2 is a simple as cfengine. I am a strong believer in the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) principle. But THANKS to the person that left the comment, and I hope that bcfg2 continues to evolve and provide an alternative to cfengine.

I also looked at Puppet. This thing looks very slick. Seems to be cfengine with a nicer syntax. On the other hand, it's not really clear that anybody is using it. That makes me nervous -- this is the kind of thing that can seriously harm machines if it does something unexpected.

Yes, I'm at GUADEC! The fourth or fifth time someone said "cool, I didn't know you were going to be here", I started trying to figure out what the mystery was? After thinking about it a bit, my big revelation is that I've somehow gotten completely out of the habit of updating my talks page! My bad! Maybe I'll sit up tonight and see if I can get it a little closer to current...

I've been really heads-down on the MediaWiki extension to allow OpenID logins -- so you can log in to Wikipedia with your TypeKey account -- and I almost managed to miss the ten thousandth article on Wikitravel en: tonight. The article was wt:Loveland (Ohio), and it was created almost 3 years after we started Wikitravel. If you read this, please drop by the Travellers' pub and leave a message of congratulations and support to the thousands of Wikitravellers who got the project this far. We're planning a wt:Wikitravel:10K Party for early August at Wikimania. It's pretty exciting for us -- such a coming-of-age for any Wiki site. tags: wikitravel 10k loveland loveland ohio openid mediawiki wikitravellers

Deprecated The humorous use of the misspelling 'teh' is now officially deprecated. tags: deprecated teh

(Written mostly for my family since hundreds of others are probably writing their take on the same for Planet Debian.) So glad tonight wasn't another slow dinner for 300 geeks, but instead a masterpiece that couldn't have been orchestrated better on purpose. Sitting in the center of a Debian "swirl" of tables in a big echoing metal-roofed meeting hall with two rough stone walls. At the "DPL table", which means we get to eat last. A mariachi band comes in in a bit of a hurry, horns playing way too loud but still fun. And quickly after there's a sound like a thousand tapping drums underneath the music as rain starts coming down, drumming on the roof. A couple of songs, a couple of burts of rain. One time the band is up on the stage, reach the climax of their music perfectly timed with a torrent of rain that concludes it, washes it away and drowns it out. Just to add to the flavor, a scene develops in front of the stage. If you ignore what's really going on (which I won't go into), it's right out of a Mexican telenovela: One tall guy with multicolored hair and some others remonstrating a guy who subtly reminds me of the Mexican clown that would be characterised as the "tramp". And then they push him right across the room to the door, with him gesticulating broadly all the way, but seeming beneath it all to be going along, miming out the scene. A croud develops over there, and for a minute the croud dynamics seem about to get ugly, but the band does their best to drown it out and soon there's a bunch of people dancing in line to the buffet. And the weather does its best too, as a whole side of the wall begins to fountain water down inside the building, pouring down, exciting and beautiful and completly unexpected. And then we sit down to eat. And then the power goes out. Pitch blackness for seconds, then it's a strobe show with one camera flash after another, the odd laptop or PDA or laser pointer breifly lighting up the scene. The lights come back on slowly, in stages, like theater lights at the end of a show. By now I'm so hyped up on Mexico and drama and disaster and life that I get up and go all over the room, chatting with lots of folks about how amazing that was, how it couldn't have been scripted better, how it's like the Debian release process, what the pictures from the blackout will look like, and just reacting to the catharsis. And outside it's a cool and gorgeous night in the street washed clean, I'm really happy right now to be in Mexico.

So it seems that Steve Kemp is finding out that, whilst being a brilliant idea in theory, CFEngine is just plain weird in practice. I was the person who originally encouraged Steve to look at Puppet when he was originally talking about this stuff about a month ago. I was arguing from a position of weakness then, as I'd never tried Puppet then (although I was already eminently familiar with CFEngine and it's issues). Since then, I have started using Puppet on a project for a client, and let me just say that it is "all that and a bag of potato chips". Luke Kanies, the main man behind Puppet, is immensely supportive, quick to work up new features when suggested (< 24 hour turn around, in some cases) and really knows his systems-management stuff. The configuration language itself is quite easy to learn, it's wonderfully extensible, and the system as a whole doesn't have nearly the same number of "WTF?" moments as CFEngine (and Luke has already, in the week or so I've been using Puppet, fixed up two of them based on my suggestions). There's only one thing in CFEngine that I use that Puppet doesn't have, and that's editfiles. This is by design, apparently -- there is no consensus, even within the CFEngine diehards, that editfiles is a good thing, and Luke isn't really keen on implementing it (it's a big feature, and there's known better ways of solving most of the problems that editfiles solves anyway). I still feel that it's useful to use editfiles in some circumstances, but not having it certainly hasn't cramped my Puppet style excessively so far. Oh, Steve -- about Ruby being "un-perl" -- that's not a bug, it's a feature!

Went to see Patricia Barber and her band at a fundraiser for the Oak Park Arts Council, and in particular its scholarships program. I had seen Barber before at her usual venue, the Green Mill. I am still somewhat divided about her music: some material is really good and innovative. I particularly like how she transforms standards, and how she can rock rather hard. Some of her stuff, on the other hand, leaves me unimpressed. But she's definitely worth watching given the opportunity. The surprise revelation of the evening, though, was Ars Nova, a standard quintet (tenor, alto, piano, bass, drums) composed of a mix of current students of the local high school OPRF as well as former students now spread across area music programs as well as Berklee. They played a set of modern classics and were really impressive. No web site to link to, unfortunately.

Large Scale Automation I’ve been revisiting CFEngine recently in anticipation of installing it on around 50 notes. Matthew Palmer has given me a lot to think about, suggesting that maybe CFengine isn’t the right tool for the job and suggesting I look at Puppet. It seems very new, and I’m not overly fond of the Rubyness - but otherwise it looks good. There are some things that CFEngine gets right, and some things it gets wrong. One of the biggest “right” things is the split of the code:

• There is a “scripting language” which can be used to apply changes to the local host.
• There is a system for distributing these scripts to a number of nodes.

That strikes me as being a perfect split. The “script” file which is executed cfagent.conf is really a ruleset which is executed once on each host. The rest of the CFEngine setup is mostly concerned with distributing this file, handling updates, logging, security etc. If I were to code a similar system that is exactly how I’d seperate it. Now we come to the rules themselves. What do we do inside them? Well in my use of it to date I’m mostly doing a small number of things:

• Copying files from a central host + setting permissions + groups.
• Making minor edits to a local file.
• Testing to see if a file contains a given string; and if not replacing it wholesale.
• Testing that processes are running, and if so stoping/restarting/starting them
• Executing commands (install package, adding ssh host keys, “cvs update”)

So those are my primitives. They can actually be reduced further. Assume that the central server runs a HTTP server - then “copying a file” becomes “execute a command (wget/curl)”. None of these jobs is complex. None of them are things that couldn’t be written with a simple scripting language such as perl, lua, etc. It is almost tempting to write a simple rule-file-intepretter/parser. But down that path lies madness. I’m going to install Puppet tonight and play with it. Gotta love Xen If that works out nicely I might switch to using it, despite my concerns that it isn’t mature and is Ruby based. If it doesn’t it becomes a choice of writing a simple intepretter + deamon which accepts SSL connections with client certificates, or living with CFEngine.

I have been playing around with avidemux, Frank Sinatra and Chavela Vargas. This is the result. Excuse the poor, amateur quality and the terrible lighting, just enjoy the love (or plain lack of it) in these videos.

Lola hunts a Grass Hopper (June 2005).

Vi and Emacs have been with me for a little more that six months now. This is a summary of the greatest moments. (July 2005 - January 2006).

As I’ve blogged earlier, I uploaded the updated Debian packages for robotour and animal last night on mentors.debian.net, and am now looking for sponsors. I also noticed that Clint has some packages for sale; I’ll take dbacl and bricolage And my fellow MOTU Stephan also has njam from Ubuntu up for adoption, and I’m taking it into Sid, not simply because I feel its my duty being a Ubuntu MOTU to give back to Debian, but because I am an existing Debian maintainer who wants to contribute more to Debian in that capacity. Some of those newly-adopted packages would have to wait, however, until I get back. I’ll be leaving for Manila this Thursday to take my UPOU midterms, as well as to get some things from my old house in Makati. I might be seeing Jerome, Clair, JM, Sacha, and the other PLUG folks at their induction. Among other things, some of my IE-using friends noticed some breakage with my blog layout (sigh). I’ll try to fix this later… Update : Anibal Avelar seems to be the DD for njam already, but I couldn’t see the package in the package pool or in the static packages page, despite being said so in the developer QA page (even the QA page for njam itself doesn’t exist). \sh, it seems that the game is still afoot! Update 2 : Ken Bloom comments that Anibal’s package is in the NEW queue.